Many reasons exist to edit videos. For example, it could be necessary to edit a video to convert the video from a first aspect ratio to a second aspect ratio, such as to convert a video from a wide screen format to a full screen format for viewing on a television or other display device. Similarly, it may be desirable to edit a video to shorten its length by removing less visually interesting portions of a video. Likewise, it may be desirable to edit a video such that the most visually interesting portions of the video are portrayed more prominently in a viewing region (such as a television or other electronic or projected display). These and other types of video editing typically require cropping saliency, area, and/or running time from an existing video and may also involve panning, zooming, changing the aspect ratio, or some other edit to the video.
Existing methods for video editing are typically manual or at least very manually intensive. Professional video editing software is typically complex and manually intensive, thus requiring either a professional video editor or substantial training to get good results. Likewise, consumer video editing products are also very manually intensive and require a steep learning curve in order to achieve good results when editing a video.
Consider, for example, the basic problem of editing a video to perform an aspect ratio conversion. In a manual conversion process, a user will typically need to guide a cropping frame throughout the entirety of the video to establish the area where the video is cropped to the new aspect ratio. This can be very time-consuming and the result generally varies in accordance with the skill of a user. A typical automated aspect ratio conversion may allow a user to select an initial position of a frame with respect to an existing video. The automated conversion then crops the entire video to conform to the initial user positioned frame, without regard to the content of the video. This automated form of aspect ratio conversion may deliver an acceptable result in some circumstances, however, more likely than not interesting visual features will be arbitrarily cropped from a video or poorly displayed in the converted video (such as at an edge).
The need to edit and display video content in an attractive and efficient manner is becoming increasingly prevalent due to the rapid rise in use of digital cameras, video recording devices, and video file sharing websites, coupled with the increasing prevalence of powerful viewing devices such as personal computers and multi-media home entertainment systems. However, as described, current methods for editing videos are either labor intensive or else suffer from drawbacks which arbitrarily eliminate interesting or important portions of a video being edited.
The drawings referred to in this description should not be understood as being drawn to scale unless specifically noted.